Finders and Seekers: Community-sourced Competitions

When I came to Kaggle for my first day of work, David, one of our awesome data scientists, greeted me at the door wearing a shirt of me:

There is a reasonable explanation of why David was wearing a shirt of me. At Kaggle, many of our best hires have come in through the Kaggle community and our personal networks (like the Google Predict meetup where I met David.) Anyone who finds a new person gets a t-shirt with their face on it.

So then we thought, why don't we extend this idea to finding the competitions themselves?

Behind the scenes here at Kaggle HQ, we’re always working hard to bring you high-quality, interesting, and diverse new competitions. Whether you compete for fun, for profit, for experience, or just for the love of the game, we consistently hear that the #1 thing you’d like from Kaggle is more competitions, across a variety of domains and problem types (well…that, and cool swag, which we are also working on).

The ideas that lead to new competitions come from everywhere – from researchers and industry across the globe, from California to Sydney to Beijing to London – but one of our best sources for new competitions has always been from you, our community. We’ve had Kaggle participants come to us in the past with leads into big companies with untouched Big Data, academics looking for data collaborators, and start-ups with not much more than a domain name and a dream.

For anyone who has had their spidey sense tingle as a colleague or friend talks about their data, we’d like to invite you to help us launch more Kaggle competitions. If you provide an introduction to someone at a company, organization, or institution that leads to a Kaggle competition, we will give you a sweet custom-made t-shirt commemorating your competition, as well as a finders-share for the Kaggle fees generated by the comp.

If you would like to be involved in launching Kaggle contests, please fill out this form and we’ll get in touch. We’re looking for contest ideas for which the datasets already exist, and introductions to organizations and researchers with whom Kaggle is not already in contact. All leads will be treated as confidential, and we will not reach out to any of your contacts without your consent.

If you have any questions, please contact margit.zwemer@kaggle.com . Whether you’re a contest solver or a contest seeker - Happy Kaggling!